Rightly (conservative version) or wrongly (liberal version), the workplace is structured to suit men, preferably men with stay-at-home wives. The qualities rewarded there – self-reliance, ambition, single-minded devotion to work – make women unfit for marriage and vice versa. By the time they are ready to settle down, their male contemporaries are married or looking for younger, softer women; if it’s not too late for a husband, it’s likely to be too late for a baby; if they manage to produce one, they’ll confront the fundamental incompatibility – practical, psychological, emotional – of motherhood and career. With some variations, this narrative of forced choices and biological deadlines, in which feminism is either irrelevant or itself the problem, forms the theme of many recent highly publicised advice books. Sometimes the young unmarried woman is told she is having too much fun and will pay later; sometimes she is told she is miserable, and no wonder – while men postpone commitment, her eggs are already scrambling. The young mother may be advised to give up work till her children are older or she may be urged to fight for government policies and workplace changes that would enable her more easily to combine both roles. But basically the books all give the same depressing advice: compromise, settle, tone yourself down, and do it sooner rather than later.

To the puzzlement of pundits and despite masses of publicity, these books tend to languish on the shelves. The commercial flop of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Baby Hunger (published in the US as Creating a Life) was noted on the front page of the New York Times. But why the surprise? Only women buy this kind of book about women, and women know perfectly well that it’s hard to find love, that offices are unfriendly to mothers, that 40 is not the ideal age to try to get pregnant. They also know that early marriage and childbearing won’t work either. The whole structure of modern middle-class professional life is against it: long years of education and training that cannot easily be started as a 35-year-old woman with a family, the need for two incomes to maintain status, the increasingly voluntary nature of marriage and childbearing itself. The best context in which to write about these conflicts is not the political tract or sociological potboiler but mass-market fiction, where feminist and retro impulses can be resolved, or blurred, through a judicious combination of truth-telling (it’s a man’s world, and the man is a swine) and fantasy.

Although both books began life as newspaper columns, it would be unfair to call Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It a working-mother version of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Pearson is a more literary writer than Helen Fielding (and almost as funny). On the other hand, both novels, while seemingly on the side of their plucky post-feminist heroines, revel in their pratfalls and humiliations. And both send conservative, ultimately dispiriting messages about women’s lives. Fielding’s point, after all, is that however much they gallivant about and mock the Smug Marrieds, single women secretly want nothing so much as a sober, stable, prosperous husband. Bridget marries the very man her parents would have chosen for her – a human rights lawyer who, in real life, would probably never marry someone as dissolute and ignorant as Bridget (that’s the fantasy element). Pearson’s message is that combining a high-powered career and motherhood is impossible, even for women as energetic and hyperorganised – to say nothing of attractive, smart and rich – as her heroine, the financial analyst Kate Reddy.

Letters

In answer to Katha Pollitt’s rhetorical question (LRB, 11 September): no, Ian Sansom isn’t the only man who’s plunged into domesticity and childcare. And writings which depict the impossibility of women ‘having it all’ serve only to insult such men and to legitimise the stance of others who perceive men to be de facto ‘like this’ and women inexorably ‘like that’. But perhaps literature depicting people who successfully combine career and family makes dull reading. If equality is to be achieved, it is, after all, people who have to change, not just men. Many of my female contemporaries have arrangements with their husbands/partners which I find quite astonishing: both have demanding full-time jobs, but she cooks and cleans, does the shopping and manages the household. If either of them has the career break or abandons work outside the home altogether when children arrive, it will be her. Women, for whatever reason, are complicit in the role they play, and many women don’t want to change, don’t want to challenge the stereotypes that define their aspirations. Maintaining these stereotypes, however, is as much the work of literature that examines the difficulty of combining work and home as it is of the magazines that show how to make your man the perfect soufflé, because it carries the implicit assumption that it is women who have to combine both, not men. There is a long way to go in redefining male and female roles, in accepting that people can be more different from members of their own sex than from members of the opposite one. Children’s school textbooks may have been excised of sexism, but notes come home from primary school inviting Mum to bake cakes and Dad to help out with a spot of DIY. Until women relinquish their tenacious hold on domesticity and childcare and ‘give’ men the responsibility for maintaining the stocks of loo roll, why should men bother?

The assumptions behind the books reviewed by Katha Pollitt and the follow-up letter (Letters, 25 September) really get my goat. The one I object to most is that (menials apart, and a scattering of doctors, vets and dons) women didn’t ‘work’ until about 1975 or 1980. Working-class women in the textile districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire always took it for granted that they would work, marry and have children to bring up. The same is true of women who worked in light engineering in Birmingham and the Black Country. My father died when I was four, and my mother went back to teaching and brought me up in the 1920s and 1930s. We had a housekeeper; working-class women got help from grandparents. But there were no luxuries of either money or time for my mother or me. What some of the well-heeled women of today are complaining about is that they don’t have time for the luxurious lifestyle that they think their positions in the City or the media entitle them to. As for the drivel about men not doing the shopping, if wives ring-fence all domestic activity, they only have themselves to blame.